University of Otago

Faculty Member, Philosophy

About

I am an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand.

The main research focus in my career so far has been the philosophy of time. I am an advocate of the new B-theory of time, according to which there is no distinction between past, present and future, and there is no passage of time. Our belief in these things is a fact about us and our experience and perception of time, rather than a fact about time itself.

My current project in this area is co-editing, with Adrian Bardon, the Blackwell Companion to the Philosophy of Time.

I have written a book about the relationship between language and reality, called Metaphysics and the Representational Fallacy. In it I argue that the significance of language for metaphysics has been grossly exaggerated. I argue that it is a fallacy to argue from features of language to conclusions about the nature of reality, one that is widely committed. I call it the representational fallacy.

I also have interests in metaphilosophical issues, philosophical methodology, and applied ethics

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